The Holocaust is unique in the annals of history, and has no place being used by politicians or interest groups as a comparative tool or analogy.

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It is that time of year again, as Jews around the world solemnly commemorate the
victims of the Holocaust while various pundits and politicians demean and
desecrate their memory.

With little respect for the facts, and even less
for those who were murdered, these puerile purveyors of propaganda do not
hesitate to invoke the most horrific act of organized mass murder in mankind’s
history all for the sake of trying to score a political point or two.

On
March 22, for example, liberal television host Chris Matthews compared former
president George W. Bush and those behind America’s war in Iraq with the
Nazis who stood trial at Nuremburg.

“I was really embarrassed,” Matthews
opined, “by my country, how a President of such limited ability, limited
rhetorical ability, mental ability, historic ability, could talk us into a war.
You know, the Nuremberg trials were primarily, before the Holocaust and all
those other issues, were against people who launched an aggressive war. And this
was an aggressive war,” he said.

If Matthews has anything to be
embarrassed about, it is his breathtaking ignorance. How dare he equate a
democracy’s principled decision to go to war with that of a murderous
dictatorship bent on genocide! And then of course there are the harebrained
activists of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), which has
revived a campaign called “Holocaust on your plate” comparing the slaughter of
chickens at factory farms to the Nazi murder of Jews at death
camps.

“Just as the Nazis tried to ‘dehumanize’ Jews by forcing them to
live in filthy, crowded conditions,” said a PETA press release, “animals on
today’s factory farms are stripped of all that is enjoyable and natural to them
and treated as nothing more than meat-, egg-, and milk-making ‘machines.’” Such
contemptible thinking, however, is not only found on the Left of the political
spectrum.

Last month, a student group called Students for Life at Eastern
Michigan University said they wanted to put on a campus exhibit likening
abortion to the Holocaust. And back in January, Idaho Republican state senator
Sheryl Nuxoll compared President Barack Obama’s health care plan to Hitler’s
mass murder of Jews. In an email she sent to supporters, Nuxoll wrote, “The
insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding
the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put
the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the
exchange.”

Huh?! However absurd such comparisons may be, they signify a
worrying trend, as a growing number of people feel no compunction about making
them. In effect, this serves to undermine the uniqueness of the catastrophe of
the Holocaust by insinuating that it is comparable to other world events, rather
than standing out in a category all of its own.

This too is a form of
Holocaust-denial, one that is no less pernicious than the blatant attempts to
say that it never happened. Before long, if such statements continue to
proliferate and are left unanswered, they will become the norm.

And this
cannot be allowed to happen.

Let’s get one thing straight: the Holocaust
is not a political talking point. It was the systematic attempt by the Germans
and their collaborators to erase the Jewish people from the face of the
earth.

When my late grandmother’s first cousin, Isaac Kottler, and his
wife Anna, were rounded up by the French police and then deported on September
2, 1942, on Transport 27 to Auschwitz, where they were murdered by the Germans,
it had nothing to do with modernday political agendas or policy debates. It was
about anti-Semitism, the age-old hatred of Jews.

The Holocaust is unique
in the annals of history, and has no place being used by politicians or interest
groups as a comparative tool or analogy.

So stop.

Stop suggesting
that Darfur and Rwanda are like Auschwitz.

Stop saying that
government-mandated health care, or Kentucky Fried Chicken, are the embodiment
of Hitler’s Final Solution.

They aren’t.

If you want to fight for
your cause, however just or ludicrous it might be, go ahead. But keep your hands
off the Holocaust. When you mix the Holocaust into the equation, it is akin to
spitting on the dead and defacing their memory.

And for that there can be
no forgiveness.

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